Find it at:

Live at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston

Legacy; 2011

Find it at:

In 2011, Pearl Jam celebrate the achievement of having been Pearl Jam for a very long time. It's their 20th anniversary, and they're marking the occasion with a blowout, yearlong victory lap: a massive curated festival, a career-spanning documentary directed by Cameron Crowe, and loving reissues of their second and third albums, Vs. and Vitalogy. It's an unusually protracted foray into the limelight for what was once a chronically spotlight-averse band, but they seem to be wearing the moment lightly, savoring it for its valedictory worth and gladly soaking up the adulation. In the years that spanned the original release of these two albums, they spent most of their effort scrambling to escape stardom, and Vs. and Vitalogy bear their struggle's deepest marks.

This willful abdication of fame has become their most well-known, oft-told story, and seeing these records given lavish repackaging only highlights that it feels like ancient history now. Consider: The opening salvo in Pearl Jam's war against commercialism was their decision, for 1993's Vs., not to make a video for MTV, a situation with no present-day analogue. Their protracted feud against Ticketmaster seems similarly remote now that Pearl Jam seemingly never stop touring: whether you live in Albany, West Palm Beach, Ljubljana, or Katowice, Pearl Jam probably just stopped by or will be there shortly, treating their entire discography like an all-you-can-eat buffet. These days, few bands are more comfortable in their own skin than Pearl Jam, and the monolithic mass culture bearing down on them in 1993 has vanished into thin air.

But even if the media context has long crumbled, the sound of a young band absolutely freaking the fuck out is still loud and clear on Vs. and Vitalogy, and it makes them Pearl Jam's most resonant and affecting records. Their huge-selling debut, Ten, hit with an impact that could not be repeated, and they would go on to make some very good music later in their career. But as a band, this remains their most vital and endearing period-- the last time the entire world cared deeply about what Pearl Jam would do next.

Their music, as always, remains the least complex part of this equation. Pearl Jam's retooled take on classic rock was often lumpy and flat-footed, and they sounded hopelessly unfashionable next to their punk-influenced contemporaries. But focusing on these flaws, as most rock critics did and still do, misses out on the music's signature virtue, which is communication. It is this burning and self-evident need for human connection, more than anything else, that has always elevated and redeemed their most dubious efforts, and it was a quality personified by Eddie Vedder, an empathetic lead singer who transmitted a vivid emotional intensity. At its most winning, Pearl Jam's music exudes his best personality traits: warm, earnest, generous, passionate, and, yeah, harmlessly dopey sometimes.

Consider, for example, Vs.'s cringe-inducing gun-control song "Glorified G". "Kindred to being an American," Vedder pronounces in a hokey fake-jingo accent, over a corn-pone Skynyrd guitar lick: it's the sort of wince-inducing mess we get when he attempts to be caustic. Vs. is filled with this sort of clumsily wielded, early-90s political indignation, and it can make for precarious listening. Nevertheless, Vedder's anguishedtenor anchors us through some rough waters-- including "Dissident", which, for some reason, focuses on the Lifetime movie-worthy story of a lonely spinster giving shelter to and falling for a charismatic young revolutionary, only to surrender him to the authorities. It is a profoundly ludicrous song. But the way Vedder hollers "she gave him away," you'll catch yourself momentarily shaking your head in disgust at the woman's cowardice. Hell, even "Glorified G" boasts a killer bridge.

In retrospect, however, Vs. appears as the moment where it became crystal-clear that Pearl Jam's ballads were ultimately stronger than their rockers. For all their clenched fury, songs like "Go", "Animal", and "Blood" mostly just thrashed awkwardly in place. "Daughter", by contrast, is plaintive and lovely, and "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" has survived nearly two decades of dorm-room slaughtering intact, an effortless and sunlit acoustic ballad that Rod Stewart could have written for Every Picture Tells a Story.

By the time of 1994's Vitalogy, Pearl Jam had spent a lot of energy on extra-musical fights. Recorded during breaks on their strenuous Vs. tour and subject to the communication breakdown of the entire band, Vedder took his strongest hand yet in the album's direction, pushing further from arena rock pyrotechnics. Somewhere in there, the original drummer-- good-natured hesher Dave Abbruzzese-- was fired due to "personality conflicts." (Read: he enjoyed being famous.)

The resulting album is still a defiantly weird beast, though not really in the way Vedder intended it to be. Under his direction, Vitalogy became their "experimental" album-- which, in Pearl Jam lingo, translates to "the one with all the most transparently awful ideas." On "Spin the Black Circle", we are treated to the spectacle of an empathetic, intuitive surfer straining to be a splenetic NYC punk rocker, while the band behind him falls over itself trying to keep pace with a simple hardcore riff. The polyrhythmic chanting of "Aya Davanita" sounds like corporate-retreat weekend warriors seeking their inner third eye in a drum circle. The accordion-and-tuba spoken-word of "Bugs" is an avert-your eyes, car-crash attempt at Captain Beefheart surrealism. And "Hey, Foxymophandelmama, That's Me" is an eight-minute sound collage featuring snippets of dialog from mental patients.

Here's the funny thing, though, about all of Vitalogy's ill-advised wandering-- it paid off elsewhere. Through all these misadventures, you can hear what was once the most rigid rhythmic backbone in rock began to stretch and pull like taffy, so that when Pearl Jam relax into a Stooges/MC5 proto-punk groove on "Last Exit", they sound rough, loose and limber like never before. In the snarling, adenoidal "Satan's Bed", Vedder actually manages one or two acerbically funny lines. It all came together on "Corduroy", which moves fluidly from quiet brooding to seething explosions to, in the chorus, a simple, humane plea, set to Vedder's single greatest melody.

"Corduroy"'s famous plea, of course, was from Vedder to his own too-adoring fans. "I don't wanna be held in your debt," he sang shakily to millions-- and, entranced, they screamed it back at him. The poignancy of Vitalogy, and the source of its actual weirdness, is how it veers from Vedder's impulse to hide from everyone and his instinctual desire to reach out. Nothing captures these warring impulses better than "Nothingman" and "Better Man", two folk-rock pillars of their catalog that are as open-hearted and yearning as anything they ever wrote. Even when he was trying his hardest to scowl at the world, Vedder couldn't help feeling, all over the place, for everyone. Misanthropy was always unbecoming on him. Most of his best, most beloved, and resonant songs are about other people's problems: "Nothingman", "Better Man", "Daughter", "Elderly Woman". In concert, the kiss-off of "Corduroy" has become Pearl Jam's most joyful, communal moment.

Live, Pearl Jam have always been a legendarily intense experience, and they've made an alarmingly consistentpractice of making at least momentary believers out of anyone who sees them. The Vitalogy and Vs. reissues come bundled with a recording of the band at their early peak, at a 1994 show at Boston's Orpheum. It's a rousing set, and it opens compellingly, on Ten's slow-burn "Oceans". But years of live-Pearl-Jam-recording fatigue has dulled the impact of another official release-- this is a band that once decided to officially release every single show of a world tour, after all-- and Live at the Orpheum Theatre contains no real revelations. As they have done for years, they cover Neil Young's "Fuckin' Up" (the version on Live on Two Legs hits harder.) They play "Even Flow"; they don't play "Jeremy". The only real surprises are when Vedder drastically changes the words to "Immortality", and when he brings out Mudhoney's Mark Arm for a vicious rip through the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer". (Unable to bring himself to utter the dreaded g-word, he introduces Arm as "one of the forefathers of... uh... all the great music that everyone listens to.") It's a fine set, but it's hardly necessary.

In the ensuing decade-plus after Vs. and Vitalogy, Pearl Jam have gone from utter exile to a comfortable perch on the fringes. That's where they sit now, finding refuge in their live shows, which have developed a traveling-cult aura that clearly recalls the Grateful Dead's. For the members of Pearl Jam, however, the live shows don't just bring together their faithful; they rewrite the band's own troubled history. In 2011, it doesn't matter what song they drag out in concert: "Lukin", the one-minute punk brain-fart from No Code? The poignant but relatively rare B-side single "I Got Id"? The ukulele song from Binaural? No worries: The crowd knows every word and will go absolutely apeshit for it. They can thrash joyfully through "Spin the Black Circle" as if Jeff Ament and Mike McCready didn't grit their way through the recording session. Hell, they can even play "Bugs" live now if they want. These days, they have the aura of happy, weathered warriors, proud to have just made it out together. The live show remains the most optimal set of conditions to give yourself over to their ham-fisted grandeur; go see them, if you have a chance. They'll be by soon.